Chapter Three Kim
Chapter Three
Kim
J ane’s spidey-sense was raised as soon as she spotted the Buddha statue.
Clients who showcased their equanimity were reliably the biggest nightmares.
This ostentatious Buddha, oozing pudgy tranquility, signaled the exact opposite.
It was an attempt to mask something: anxiety, addiction, rage; a disorder (narcissistic personality, borderline personality, obsessive-compulsive disorder were all possibilities); or some turbulent blend of these and other pathologies.
But wait—wasn’t duality quintessentially Buddhist?
So perhaps someone could simultaneously be both a repellant chaotic mess and enlightened?
Jane caught herself. Surely some of the Buddhists in Los Angeles were genuinely serene ascetics.
She needed to be less binary in her thinking.
After all, everything was about spectrums these days.
Buddha aside, it was still clear from the get-go that this woman would be a challenge. Kim Strauss had answered the door yammering on her phone and indicated that she was mid-conversation by holding a bony finger up uncomfortably close to Jane’s face.
“Okay, I have some notes, but—let me try to distill them, okay? And then, yeah, we can talk. I mean, I can’t articulate it exactly, but it’s missing something.
You know, what makes it noisy? What makes it stand out?
What’s ‘the thing’? Everything needs a thing.
... Well, I can’t tell you what the thing is, you have to dig and find it.
... I know you worked hard, Sally, and I am sorry I don’t like it more, but I have to be honest. Because I want it to work, for all of us.
I’m on your side! No one is more in your corner than me, okay?
... Okay okay, I am walking into a meeting now, bye. ”
Kim, a movie producer with scant credits, worked from home.
Jane had googled her and gleaned the pertinent details.
One movie Kim had finagled an executive producer credit on went to Sundance; another got some kind of limited theatrical release.
And like everyone who had been working in the feature film business, she was now desperately trying to find an angle to get into television and streaming.
When Kim ended the call and turned her attention to Jane, she informed her that she was “really really busy” and actually was “really really organized” but she had no idea how her last assistant organized anything, which is why she had to fire her, so now she needed her home office “entirely revamped.” Then Kim had beckoned her inside, and that’s when Jane first laid eyes on the ominous Buddha.
She had made a vow recently: she was going to try to find something good in everyone, even people she found odious.
Reflexive misanthropy was getting tiresome.
Teddy was so good-natured, but at the expense of being a discerning judge of character; he overlooked many defects.
He was easygoing and happy, and sometimes Jane wondered if she could be more like him.
But unlike Teddy, she wasn’t the stop-and-smell-the-roses type; she was more liable to trample the roses while preoccupied by the thoughts roiling in her head.
A problem-solver, Jane wanted to solve herself.
She wanted to see positives as clearly and vividly as she saw negatives.
She wanted a whole new lens for her life.
It would take a lot of work to get there, and right now, she had to deal with Kim.
The house, which had views of the San Fernando Valley, was rigorously mid-century in its architecture and decor.
The furnishings managed to look expensive and generic at the same time, and because the mid-century revival had peaked over a decade ago, it looked dated—not in a retro chic way, but in an old, tired way.
Kim herself embodied the style of the house.
Her lean muscularity, evidence of hours of Pilates and Cardio Barre, echoed the rigid post-and-beam angularity of the architecture: both the house and Kim were assemblies of cold, hard surfaces.
The Buddha, perched on an otherwise bare shelf over the living room sofa, was the only curvilinear object in sight.
Jane studied Kim more closely. Her skin was as smooth and shiny as her kitchen counter. Her hair was a long, straight honey blond that matched the washed-out teak of the flooring.
In Los Angeles, women got blonder as they got older, and this ubiquitous straw hair color was high maintenance, requiring pricey, laborious salon treatments.
On Kim, who had dark brown eyes and olive skin, the long blond hair looked incongruous.
Jane used to wish that her brown hair was lighter, but she’d grown proud of the richness of the color.
That was some progress, right? A pinch of self-regard, if not self-love. And it felt good. She wanted more.
“So like I said, I am really quite organized already. I mean, you can see, obviously. It’s just my assistant was such a fucking idiot.”
Indeed, the house was quite tidy; all the surfaces were polished and clutter-free.
“Yes, very impressive. So what exactly do you need help with?”
“Well, I can never seem to find something when I need it. I’m not a secretary, so filing isn’t my specialty, right?
And I try to deal with electronic documents, but the cloud shit never seems to work for me, no one has been able to set it up for me properly, and anyway when I give script notes, you know, I still like to mark up a hard copy.
I’m really really busy, I have so much going on, and I need things organized in a simple way so I know where everything is.
I am not even sure you can help me, but I figured it was worth a try. ”
Jane nodded. “Let me see what I can do. Where do you want me to start?”
“Like I said, my office.”
She actually had not said that. Jane started ujjayi breathing to remain calm.
“Okay, show me the way.”
The house had an open floor plan, and Kim’s office was a nook right off the living room.
Kim pulled open a desk drawer made for hanging files, but there were no files; only messy stacks of papers.
“I have to get on a call now, so why don’t you go through some of this. There’s personal stuff in there, too, but I don’t care, you can look over anything and everything. I’ll be like thirty minutes to an hour.”
The surface of the desk was pristine, but for a cannabis vaporizer.
Because there were so few extraneous items on display, each object—like the Buddha—felt freighted with significance.
Jane surmised that Kim, a tense ball of nerves all day, would greet the night with a mist of weed to soothe, numb, and conjure patience, a haze that only masked troublesome issues that cannabis could never make go away.
Jane sighed. Last night, she had an argument with Teddy about his marijuana use, an argument they kept lapsing into as if it were on repeat.
Teddy had gone shopping and forgotten milk. Jane couldn’t understand how he could go to the market without checking first and seeing what they needed.
“I wasn’t shopping shopping. I just went in to pick up some things I wanted for dinner.”
“But it didn’t even occur to you to look in the fridge and see what else we needed? Or to ask me?”
“I don’t plan every minute of my day like you do, Jane. So sometimes huge catastrophes—like not getting milk—happen.”
“Not getting milk or berries.”
“We should call in FEMA.”
His sarcasm is what had tipped her over the edge.
“Well maybe you could plan a little better if you smoked a lot less weed.”
“Jane, stop. It’s legal. It’s medicine,” Teddy told her.
“Okay, but what are you medicating?”
“I need it to deal with you!”
“Nice, Teddy. I’m the problem, and not the fact that you’re stressed about going nowhere with any of the careers you’re supposedly pursuing—”
“Jesus, Jane, back off! I was joking!”
“It didn’t sound like a joke to me,” Jane said, wounded.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you think that being high all the time makes you lose focus? Are you truly happy doing nothing at all?”
“Yeah, well at least I’m not slicing and dicing my way through life like you do, labeling everything and everyone,” Teddy shot back. “And I am not high all the time. You see what you want to see, Jane.”
“I see what you can’t see in your fog of weed.”
“ You should smoke weed, Jane, because you need to chill the fuck out.”
At this, Jane had gone into the bedroom and turned on the TV. She channel-surfed, but everything was grating. She turned it off and closed her eyes. Was she some kind of Puritan scold? Had she been a nag? Too cutting? Maybe Teddy was right and she did need to chill the fuck out.
She gathered herself and found Teddy already engrossed in Fortnite .
“Teddy, you’re right. I do need to chill. Sorry if I went overboard.”
He kept one eye on the screen and looked at her out of the corner of the other.
“No worries. I know just the thing. Slurricane, it’s the indica you need.”
He was so ready to forgive. It was one of the qualities Jane did love about him. He fired up the vaporizer. The fumes initially seemed slightly acrid, but as Jane felt them unfurling in her lungs, she willed herself to go with this high, not to fight it.
They ended up playing Fortnite for a short time. Jane played rarely and badly. Teddy encouraged her to try harder; she would get better and enjoy it more.
“Jane did you see that assault rifle? Why did you pick up that piece of pizza?”
“I like pizza more than guns, okay?”
“Okay, you’re definitely stoned.”
Jane’s avatar dashed across the lime green meadow and took cover in a bush.
“Jay! That is the worst possible place to camp!”
“Well, it looks inviting.... It’s not like some bunker or anything.”
“Shoot, Jane, shoot! They’re coming at you fast and hard!”
Jane was reluctant to even pretend to kill anyone. It was barbaric.
“Jane, these are all, you know, pixels—pretend!”
“I just can’t, Teddy.”